Outrageous 9/11 memorialBy Tom SmithThis really is an outrage. A small cabal of various left-wing lawyers and academics has the contract to plan the 9/11 memorial on ground zero, and it looks like it's going to be one of those dreadful PBS style history lessons on how awful humans, but especially Americans, are. So the same people who are suing Rumsfeld for interrogating terrorists and not being nice about it, get to plan what we look at when we walk through all that is left of the Twin Towers. This is like letting Jane Fonda plan the Vietnam memorial. Yes, yes, I'm sure the ACLU has some points worth making, out of all the points they have that are not. But to put people in charge of the memorial who have the least in common with the firefighters and police who died there, and probably most of the victims, if they could speak (those last few minutes roasting alive were probably quite an education in the nature of our enemies), is an insult to the whole country. Or more precisely, it is taking people who are in the business of regularly insulting this country, and giving them the contract for what ought to be ground as sacred as any in this country. We didn't have somebody who thought, really, you have to look at slavery from both sides now, give the Gettysburg address. The Holocaust Memorial doesn't have little show-and-tell lessons on why the Germans hated the Jews so much, with the implicit message being, really, you can see why.

This is something worth a little internet campaign. Maybe the feds should step in. Congress could just declare the area a national monument or something. Just the threat of doing so would put things in perspective for the planners in a big hurry. This absolutely should be taken out of the hands of the Manhattan and Hollywood political types. Ground Zero is sacred ground, not just to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, but to the whole country. It was a battlefield in a war that will go on for some time. There is a powerful national interest in not letting people who apologize every morning for being American turn this graven place into some kind of sick shrine of national self-loathing.